I sincerely hope you have been watching Mad Men, and that you have not waited as long as I did to discover its addictive charms. Sean and I raced through Season One (courtesy of Netflix, that devilish dealer ) and are now catching up on Season Two (courtesy of OnDemand, that wily enabler).

How was your Labor Day weekend? Mine was rather nice actually, mostly because it involved a lot of eating. Well, eating and drinking, I suppose, with some light shopping and hammock-lounging thrown in, and come to think of it, those four things are, like, my four favorite things in the world, so actually it was a very good Labor Day weekend indeed. If only a loincloth-wearing George Clooney had been present for the eating or drinking or hammock-lounging (not the shopping, that might have been weird), I'd say it would have been perfect.

Holy shitballs, there are a lot of entries for my Nintendo DS Lite competition already. Apologies to my mother, father, Sean's mother and father, various assorted aunts and family members, and anyone else who might have been offended by me starting a post with holy shitballs, but whoa. You people are some fierce competitors.

Toblerones are a fairly divisive issue, aren't they? You either love them or you hate them, I've found: much like black licorice and Marmite. (For the record, I love both black licorice and Marmite. And Toblerones, obviously.)

Well, wow, that was fun, wasn't it? Thank you so much to everyone who entered my competition; I can't tell you how interesting it was to read through all those middle names. I'm slightly obsessed with names, you see---I have been for as long as I can remember; I actually got a baby-naming book for my seventh birthday---and having 655 people present me with their middle names, one after the other like that, was as exciting as Christmas morning!

I've been fairly conflicted about my choice of household cleaner recently: on the one hand, I like to know that I'm buying something decent-ish for the environment---as well as relatively unlikely to cause my potential children to be born with three and a half heads each---but on the other hand, nothing gets my countertops cleaner and whiter and more sterile-feeling than good old Clorox.

In much the same way that I was a little late to the whole blogging thing, and then again to the whole Twittering thing, I was also a little late in jumping on the bandwagon marked "iGoogle homepage." (Seriously, those bandwagons are like buses: terrible signage!)

I guess I never really told you that much about scuba diving, did I? And yes, I know I’m supposed to capitalize SCUBA---it’s actually an acronym for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus; did you know that? Because if you ever decide to get certified, IT’S ON THE TEST, YOU’RE WELCOME—but I hope you'll bear with me if I decide not to. As you can see, I already make far too much use of the Caps Lock button.

So here is what happens when you're staying in Salinas, California, and it's 9:30 at night and you've already eaten the town's best Mexican food, and the only other possibility the evening holds is heading back to your soulless room at the Marriott Residence Inn, making some peppermint tea at the 24-hour tea-making station in the hotel lobby, breaking open one of those 100-calorie bags of Swedish fish, and watching two straight hours of Ballot Bowl on CNN.

So last Tuesday, we went all the way back to 1993 to laugh collectively at my too-short dress. For this week's Bad Decision Tuesday, I thought I’d whip us back even further in time so we could all have a good old guffaw at my apparent homage to....well, whoever wore berets and wore them famously. Pablo Picasso?

1.Is it just me or has flying become a little more.....informal than it used to be? I'm not so much talking about the preponderance of sweatsuits and bonafide, no-kidding, $11.99-at-Old-Navy plaid pajama pants in the security line---though Sarah Brown's airport observation that "America is terrified that it might for one minute be uncomfortable" is bang-on---but rather about the rather jocular flight attendant on my plane from Dallas to Denve

I think we can all agree that witnessing a man taking a crap in public---right there on the street, a mere two blocks from your house---is likely to put a damper on anyone's afternoon. And yes, this is an entirely true story. However, when witnessing a man taking a crap in public is not the most disturbing thing that happens to you all day: well, then you've got a problem.

I've never met a cookie I didn't like. I have, however, met a cookie my hips didn't like, and although I mostly ignore my hips when it comes to Cookie-Related Matters, there comes a point every so often when you stop, step back, and think damn, these hips are right. This point is usually somewhere between trying to do up the second and third button.

I like to keep it fresh around here for Bad Decision Tuesdays: you just never know what decade you're going to end up in! Last week, for instance, we hovered somewhere around 1987 or 1988 while laughing at my beret; the week before that, we landed in 1993 to gawp at my too-short dress.

Pretty much the main reason we're going to London next week is to see my friend Victoria get married. Victoria and I were at school together in England, and although we didn't become friendly until we were fifteen or sixteen, we've known each other since we were eleven. Which, holy smokes, means we've known each for seventeen years, although I guess that's just as well, actually; knowing someone for seventeen years seems like a pretty good reason to spend a month's rent on a plane ticket.